The High Price of Cheap Meat: The Damaging Effects of Factory Farming

"I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals."

Henry David Thoreau

"Perhaps in the back of our minds we already understand, without all the science... that something terribly wrong is happening. Our substance now comes from misery. We know that if someone offers to show us a film on how our meat is produced, it will be a horror film. We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory—disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own."

Jonathan Safran Foer

"A man can be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral."

Leo Tolstoy

The Environment

The factory farming industry is one of the biggest strains on our planet. It pollutes our air and water, contributes to global warming, and wastes huge amounts of vital resources like land and water. Unfortunately, the private profit-seeking of factory farm corporations leads to damaging of public goods that we all use and need. This is where a lot of the hidden costs of industrial farming lies—its heavy taxes on our environment.

Listen to Dr. Mark Graham and Dr. Brett Wilmot overview the many environmentally damaging effects of this unsustainable practice, or scroll down for more detailed info.

Air Pollution

Global warming: Did you know that the livestock sector accounts for 18% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions? That’s more than all forms of transportation combined. (2006 UN Report)

65% of human-related nitrous oxide, which has 296 times the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of CO2.

Local pollution: The air at some factory farm test sites in the United States is dirtier than in America’s most polluted cities guidelines, (report by the Environmental Integrity Project). The pollution levels are high enough to suggest that those living near massive livestock operations also may be at risk.

Water Pollution

Cows especially produce an incredible amount of waste. According to the EPA, “a single dairy cow produces approximately 120 pounds of wet manure per day,” . Annually, livestock produce between 3 and 20 times more waste than people—1.2-1.37 billion tons of waste (EPA 2005).

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, livestock waste has polluted more than 27,000 miles of rivers and contaminated groundwater in dozens of states. (Natural Resources Defense Council)

In 1995 an 8-acre hog-waste lagoon in North Carolina burst, spilling 25 million gallons of manure into the New River. The spill killed about 10 million fish and closed 364,000 acres of coastal wetlands to shell-fishing.

From 1995 to 1998, 1,000 spills or pollution incidents occurred at livestock feedlots in 10 states and 200 manure-related fish kills resulted in the death of 13 million fish.

When Hurricane Floyd hit North Carolina in 1999, at least five manure lagoons burst and approximately 47 lagoons were completely flooded.

In August 2005, a lagoon wall collapsed at a dairy in western New York. Three million gallons of animal waste spilled into the Black River, killing 250,000 fish. The town of Watertown had to suspend use of the river as the source of their water supply.

Runoff of chicken and hog waste from factory farms in Maryland and North Carolina is believed to have contributed to outbreaks of Pfiesteria piscicida, killing millions of fish and causing skin irritation, short-term memory loss and other cognitive problems in local people.

Nutrients in animal waste cause algal blooms, which use up oxygen in the water, contributing to a "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico (above) where there's not enough oxygen to support aquatic life. In 2002, the zone expanded to a record 8,500 square miles; in 2010 it spanned over 7,700 square miles

Ammonia, a toxic form of nitrogen released in gas form during waste disposal, can be carried more than 300 miles through the air before being dumped back onto the ground or into the water, where it causes algal blooms and kills fish (all info from NRDC, National Resources Defense Council)

Waste of Water

It takes 1,799 gallons of water to produce 1 single pound of bee.f (National Geographic)

Waste of Land

Because of the amount of grain they consume, farm animals take much more land than crops do to produce a given amount of food energy. Livestock now use 30% of the earth’s entire land surface, including permanent pasture and arable land used to grow livestock feed (accounting for 33% of the globe’s farmable land)

Mass for soybean and corn plantations in Latin and South America destroys biodiversity, weakens indigenous ecosystems, and severely reduces the amount of oxygen produced by trees (in order to make room for soybean and corn plantations to feed farm animals)

In the Brazilian Amazon for example, the total land that has been cleared for cattle grazing amounts to an area larger than the size of France.

Herd grazing causes wide-scale land degradation, with about 20% of pastures considered degraded through overgrazing, compaction and erosion

While 56 million acres of U.S. land are producing hay for livestock, only 4 million acres are producing vegetables for human consumption. —U.S. Department of Commerce, Census of Agriculture

Many argue that this land could be used to feed people instead of animals. In 1990, the World Hunger Program at Brown University calculated that recent world harvests, if equitably distributed with no diversion of grain to feeding livestock, could provide a vegetarian diet to 6 billion people!